For a Sunday before the Democratic convention, the headlines could hardly have been better from the Democrats’ perspective. “Harris Holds Slight National Lead Over Trump.” “Trump escalates gendered personal insults against Harris, defying GOP pressure.” “Far-right influencers turn against Trump’s campaign team.” “Trump Turned the Democratic Party into a Pitiless Machine” (yep, that’s a good thing). The New York Times showed on its home page the recent trend lines in four polls—national, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. To be sure, they were all close, but in all four, Harris had turned a deficit into a narrow lead.
Add to this the joy liberals were taking Saturday night on X/Twitter in posting photo and video shots comparing the turnouts for Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania to Tim Walz’s rally in Nebraska. Walz’s crowd made it look like he was opening for Taylor Swift—packed to the rafters. Pans of Trump’s arena showed hundreds of empty seats and a steady stream of people voting with their feet.
The Democrats are more stoked heading into Chicago for this convention than they have been since Denver in 2008, when Barack Obama gave that historic speech at Mile High Stadium. Harris hasn’t made a single bad move that I can think of. Walz has been great—the chemistry between the two of them sure looks genuine, and the attempt last week by some on the right to go after Walz for “mocking white people” because he eats a certain kind of taco was some real weak sauce. What the right can’t stand is that a Democratic standard-bearer is a Midwestern white guy football coach they can’t marginalize or Other-ize—and it galls them all the more, of course, that he called them “weird,” and that it had legs.
The right is just in psychological free fall right now. The story under the headline I cited up top about angry far-right influencers is a delicious read. Nick Fuentes and Laura Loomer and Candace Owens and other racist and antisemitic cambions (fancy insult alert!) are up in arms because, I guess, his campaign isn’t racist and antisemitic enough. Good, Donald, do that; that’ll help!
As for Trump himself, well … he’s flailing. He calls Harris a “lunatic” repeatedly. He thinks her laugh will do her in (“as soon as she laughs, the election’s over”). He calls her beautiful then says he’s “much better looking” (is that with or without the orange goop?). He compares her to … wait for it … Sophia Loren! I know what Sophia Loren looked like. People my age generally do. But honestly. Remember when Bob Dole invoked the Brooklyn Dodgers? Now that Trump is the old man in this race, these gaffes should start counting.
But the big flailing tell is his current fixation on communism. She’s gone “full communist” with her talk of “price controls.” “Kamala” even sounds sort of like “communist,” you see. In Trump’s brain, riffing on that counts as clever.
What Harris proposed, among many other ideas, was a Federal Trade Commission crackdown on post-pandemic price gouging. That some price gouging has taken and is taking place is not seriously disputed. Economists generally hate the government doing anything about it, though, because, well, the government (to these economists) isn’t supposed to do anything ever to mess with the glorious free market.
Interestingly, a person of note once disagreed with that. He signed Executive Order 13910, which enabled the Justice Department to establish a Covid-19 Hoarding and Price Gouging Task Force. Want to hazard a guess? Here’s a hint: He signed the order on March 18, 2020, and he was the president at the time. Yep. Donald Trump.
Now, many will say we were in the teeth of a crisis then and are not now. That’s true. And yet, we know that corporate profits are at massive record highs (look at this chart). If some corporations raised their prices legitimately during shortages but have kept them high after those shortages ended, isn’t it the government’s business to say “no you don’t”? Of course it is.
Let Trump call that communist all he wants. If the FTC gets the price of eggs or diapers lowered a bit, it seems safe to say that most swing voters won’t care what label Trump and the economics profession put on it.
Harris’s focus on kitchen table economics is in fact the most heartening development of her brief campaign. If the convention is dedicated chiefly to that proposition, to telling Americans over and over again in different ways that the Democratic Party is on their side against the billionaires who think taxation (on them) is slavery and the corporations that are picking their pockets, then it will be a huge success.
There are risks. Harris needs to be herself. She can’t try to channel Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren; it won’t be authentic. A certain amount of reassuring of centrists needs to happen, because House Democrats from purple districts who absolutely need to win their races for the party to recapture the House have to walk out of Chicago being fully on board.
And of course the protests scheduled for convention week carry a risk. Chicago is not governed by Richard Daley, who, though a Democrat, was a racist reactionary on law and order. It’s governed by Brandon Johnson, a Black liberal who most definitely does not want a replay of 1968. Some protestors may want that, but hopefully they’ll be a small minority.
But in general, the signs right now could hardly be better. The Dems are in array, in a huge way, and the Reps are a train wreck. And another thing that I admit has surprised me a little: It appears that people, having taken the measure of Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate, have decided that they kinda like her, and that she is certainly presidential timber. We don’t have to go through any (or very much, anyway) of that “is America really ready for a …” business.
By Friday morning, one hopes, Americans will like her even more. They’ll like Tim Walz even more. They’ll see a party that is united, jazzed beyond belief, and on their economic side. And on the other side, they’ll see a tired, tumefied (fancy adjective alert!) old fool lobbing flaccid darts that don’t carry beyond his base, and a GOP that is confused and enraged as it comes to collective grips with the fact that a Black South-Asian woman who grew up partly in none other than Berkeley, California, is running circles around them and is the real American in the race. And if that’s how this week goes, then we’ll know: Yes, America is damn straight ready for President Kamala Harris.
